Sports and politics do not occupy separate spheres.
At the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, freestyle skier Hunter Hess told reporters he felt “mixed emotions” competing for the United States in light of the current political environment. President Trump fired back on Truth Social, calling Hess “a real loser” and saying it was difficult to support him.
The president has joined a chorus calling for athletes to divorce politics from their careers and to “stick to sports.” The demand has emerged in response to Winter Olympic athletes speaking out against the Trump administration. Figure skater Alysa Liu, daughter of a political refugee, called on people to “notice the faults in our own government.” Snowboarder Chloe Kim, the child of first-generation immigrants, urged the public to “lead with love and compassion.” The U.S. women’s hockey team declined a White House invitation after Trump made a demeaning comment in a phone call to the U.S. men’s ice hockey team; Hilary Knight called it “a distasteful joke.” Athletes faced coordinated online harassment severe enough to prompt a statement from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
This is not a new dynamic. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists during the 200-meter medal ceremony in protest of racial injustice as the “Star-Spangled Banner” played. Smith and Carlos were expelled from the Games and ostracized from the athletic community. A 1968 Time magazine derided the scene as “Angrier, nastier, uglier,” a play on the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” calling it “the theater of the absurd.” Meanwhile, Black athlete Willie Davenport was lauded for forgoing politics, standing “straight and tall” at the podium.
The message then, as now, was that the fight for civil liberties only matters when it doesn’t interfere with our sports: the escapist spectacle that shields us from uncomfortable realities, if only for the length of a game.
The demand to keep politics out of sports rests on a premise that has never been accurate. Sports and politics were never two separate things. Rather, sports have always served as a political tether. The ancient Greek Olympics served as a mode for city-states to establish dominance over their neighbors and rivals. And the influence of sports in a political society cannot be denied. Sports fans worship athletes as heroes, sing anthems that affirm our national supremacy and memorize player facts and statistics. Anything so closely interwoven with the fabric of our inherently political lends itself as a political platform. At the centers of our societies and so heavily televised, what gives for sports to be immune to politics?
In all its glory, the Olympic Games are no different from every sporting event: never escaping the politics of the nations that send athletes to compete in them. NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice, a movement reignited after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified from competition at the 2026 Olympics for wearing a helmet bearing the names of fellow teammates killed in Russia’s invasion of his country. In each case, athletes who chose to speak paid a significant price.
The Olympics only serve to amplify the intense nationalism that sports provoke. In representing the nation, Team USA athletes are intrinsically political figures with the power to define what it means to be American. Their words and actions are broadcast to the nation, shaping the subjectivities of those who watch them on television.
When athletes are condemned for expressing dissent, the message is not that sports should be protected from politics. It is that certain political positions should be protected from scrutiny. The United States was intended to be a nation of civil discourse. Our right to protest is enshrined within the First Amendment. Protesters across this country are being tear-gassed, shot and killed for exercising the same rights these athletes invoked from a press conference microphone. Why do sports suddenly incite the notion that we need to be blindly nationalist? Why silence athletes on a platform now?
Everything these athletes do is political, magnified by the slew of cameras and reporters that follow the world’s best athletes through every moment of their Olympic journey. Watching a sports game was never meant to be an escape from the politics of the real world. If a demonstration of civil unrest makes you uncomfortable at a sporting event, remember that sports and politics were never separate.
